Whelan is best known for composing a piece for the interval of the 1994 Eurovision Song Contest. The result, Riverdance, is a seven-minute display of traditional Irish dancing that becomes a full-length stage production and spawns a worldwide craze for Irish dancing and Celtic music and also wins him a Grammy Award. It is released as a single in the United Kingdom in 1994, credited to “Bill Whelan and Anúna featuring the RTÉ Concert Orchestra.” It reaches number 9 and stays in the charts for 16 weeks. The album of the same title reaches number 31 in the album charts in 1995. He also composes a symphonic suite version of Riverdance, with its premiere performed by the Ulster Orchestra on BBC Radio 3 in August 2014.

Gavin Friday, born Fionán Martin Hanvey, Irish singer and songwriter, composer, actor and painter, is born in Dublin on October 8, 1959.

Friday grows up in Ballygall, a neighbourhood located on Dublin’s Northside between Finglas and Glasnevin where he went to school. When he is fourteen years old and living on Cedarwood Road, he meets Bono and Guggi at a party to which he has not been invited. Bono says, “We caught him trying to steal something of the house. Classic teenage stuff… but we became friends.”

Friday is a founding member of the post-punk group Virgin Prunes and has recorded several solo albums and soundtracks. In 1986, after the demise of The Virgin Prunes, he devotes himself to painting for a while, sharing a studio with Bono, Guggi and Charlie Whisker. This results in the exhibition Four Artists – Many Wednesdays (1988) at Dublin’s Hendricks Gallery. Friday, Guggi and Whisker show paintings, while Bono opts to exhibit photos taken in Ethiopia. Friday’s part of the show is entitled I didn’t come up the Liffey in a bubble, an expression often used by his father.

Friday has maintained a close friendship with U2‘s Bono since childhood, and they collaborate on the soundtrack for the Jim Sheridan’s film In the Name of the Father, including the title track, “Billy Boola” and “You Made Me the Thief of Your Heart”, which is sung by Sinéad O’Connor and nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song. In 2003 they write “Time Enough for Tears,” the original theme tune for Sheridan’s film In America, as sung by Andrea Corr. The song is nominated for a Golden Globe Award for Best Original Song.

In 2009 Friday and Macken work on Bryars’ fourth studio album. On April 6, 2010 Rubyworks Records announces the signing of Gavin Friday and that a new album is on its way. The new CD is titled catholic and is released in Ireland on Good Friday, April 22, 2011.

Dennis Bell, director of New York gospel choir The New Voices of Freedom, records a demo of a gospel version of “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For.” While in Glasgow, Scotland in late July during U2’s Joshua Tree Tour, Rob Partridge of Island Records plays the demo for the band. In late September, U2 rehearses with Bell’s choir in a Harlem church, and a few days later they perform the song together at U2’s Madison Square Garden concert.

Footage of the rehearsal is featured in the rockumentaryRattle and Hum, while the Madison Square Garden performance appears on the Rattle and Humalbum, the band’s sixth studio album. After the church rehearsal, U2 walks around the Harlem neighbourhood where they come across blues duo Satan and Adam playing on the street. A 40-second clip of them playing their composition “Freedom for My People” appears on both the movie and the album.

Eithne Pádraigín Ní Bhraonáin, singer, songwriter, musician, and producer better known professionally as Enya, is born into a musical family in Dore, Gweedore, County Donegal on May 17, 1961.

Enya’s father, Leo Brennan, is the leader of the Slieve Foy Band, an Irish showband, and runs Leo’s Tavern in Meenaleck. Her mother, Máire Brennan (née Duggan), who has Spanish roots, is an amateur musician who plays in Leo’s band and teaches music at Gweedore Community School. Her maternal grandfather, Aodh, is the founder of the Gweedore Theatre company.

Enya begins her music career when she joins her family’s Celtic bandClannad in 1980 on keyboards and backing vocals. She leaves in 1982 with their manager and producer Nicky Ryan to pursue a solo career, with Ryan’s wife Roma Ryan as her lyricist. Enya develops her distinct sound over the following four years with multi-tracked vocals and keyboards with elements of new age, Celtic, classical, church, and folk music. She sings in ten languages.

Enya is known for her private lifestyle and has yet to undergo a concert tour. She is Ireland’s biggest selling solo artist and second overall behind U2, with a discography that has sold 26.5 million certified albums in the United States and an estimated 80 million albums worldwide, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time. A Day Without Rain (2000) remains the best selling new age album with an estimated 16 million copies sold worldwide.

Graham’s long time colleague and Hot Press editor Niall Stokes describes him, “In many ways, he was a founding father of modern Irish music. He inspired a whole generation of Irish fans and musicians to look at the world in a different and broader light. And he was good on more than music too. He felt a kinship with Northern Ireland and the people on both sides of the sectarian and political divide there that was unusual in those who were brought up within the narrow confines of the culture of Ireland in the ‘60s and ‘70s – and his political writing reflected this. And he was also ahead of the game in terms of his appreciation of the importance of the politics of food and the position of the developing world in the new era.”

Graham is instrumental in the formation of Irish rock band U2, having brought them to the attention of their manager Paul McGuinness. At an exhibition of early group photos, McGuinness remembers the role Bill Graham played by introducing him to the band. Despite being widely known as the man who “discovered” U2, it is a title he disavowed. He writes enthusiastically about the band, giving them their first exposure. Both guitarist The Edge and Bono have explained Graham’s role in the band’s development.

John Waters observes that “It is often said that Bill ‘discovered’ U2. This is untrue. Bill created U2, through his enthusiasm for them. He gave them a reflection of their own possibilities and they only looked back that once.” Graham has a deep knowledge of virtually every form of popular and roots music. Waters goes on to credit him as “the first Irish writer to write about the connection between Irish political culture and Irish rock’n’roll.”

A number of music critics/journalists have cited Graham as a primary influence, in some cases suggesting they got into the field as a direct result of his writing.

Clayton is the oldest child of Brian and Jo Clayton. His father is a pilot with the Royal Air Force, who moves into civil aviation, and his mother is a former airline flight attendant. When he is 4 years old his father works in Kenya as a pilot with East African Airways. Clayton regards this as the happiest period of his childhood. In 1965 the family moves to Malahide, County Dublin, where Clayton’s brother Sebastian is born. The Clayton family becomes friends with the Evans family, including their son, David, who later becomes a fellow U2 band-member with Clayton.

When he is eight years old Clayton is sent to the private junior boarding Castle Park School in Dalkey, Dublin, which he did not enjoy because he is not particularly sports orientated. At age 13 he enters the private St. Columba’s College secondary school in Rathfarnham, Dublin. Here he makes friends with other pupils who are enthusiastic about pop/rock music. It is here in the school band where Clayton plays the bass guitar for the first time.

Clayton later changes school to Mount Temple Comprehensive School in Dublin, where he meets future bandmates, Paul Hewson (aka “Bono“) and Larry Mullen Jr., and is reunited with his childhood friend David Evans (aka “The Edge”). In September 1976, Mullen puts an advert onto the school’s bulletin board seeking other musicians to form a band. The original band is a five-piece band known as “Feedback,” consisting of Bono, The Edge, Mullen, Dik Evans, and Clayton. The name is subsequently changed to “The Hype,” but changes to “U2” soon after Dik Evans leaves the band. Clayton stands in as the nearest thing that the band has to a manager in its early life, handing over the duties to Paul McGuinness in May 1978.

In 1981, around the time of U2’s second, spiritually charged October album, a rift is created in the band between Clayton and McGuinness, and the three other band members. Bono, The Edge, and Mullen have joined a Christian group, and are questioning the compatibility of rock music with their spirituality. However, Clayton, with his more ambiguous religious views, is less concerned, and so is more of an outsider, until Bono’s wedding to Alison Hewson (née Stewart), in which Clayton is the best man.

Clayton makes international headlines in August 1989 when he is arrested in Dublin for carrying a small amount of marijuana. He avoids conviction by making a large donation to charity. Clayton also has alcohol problems, which come to a head on November 26, 1993, when he is so hung over that he is unable to play that night’s show in Sydney, the dress rehearsal for their Zoo TV concert film. Bass duties are fulfilled by Clayton’s technician Stuart Morgan. After that incident, however, Clayton gives up alcohol.

In 1995, after the Zoo TV Tour and Zooropa album, Clayton heads to New York City with bandmate Mullen to receive formal training in the bass as until then Clayton has been entirely self-taught. Bono says of Clayton’s early bass playing, “Adam used to pretend he could play bass. He came round and started using words like ‘action’ and ‘fret’ and he had us baffled. He had the only amplifier, so we never argued with him. We thought this guy must be a musician; he knows what he’s talking about. And then one day, we discovered he wasn’t playing the right notes. That’s what’s wrong, y’know?”

In 2011 Clayton becomes an ambassador for the Dublin-based St. Patrick’s Hospital‘s Mental Health Service “Walk in My Shoes” facility.

David Howell Evans, British-born Irish musician and songwriter best known by his stage name The Edge and as the lead guitarist, keyboardist, and backing vocalist of the rock band U2, is born at the Maternity Hospital in Barking, Essex, England on August 8, 1961. A member of U2 since its inception, he has recorded 13 studio albums with the band as well as one solo record.

The Edge is raised in Ireland after the Evans family relocates there while he is still an infant. He receives his initial formal education at St. Andrew’s National School in Dublin. As a child he also receives piano and guitar lessons, and practises music with his elder brother Richard. In 1976, at Mount Temple Comprehensive School, he goes to a meeting in response to an advert posted by another pupil, Larry Mullen Jr., on the school’s noticeboard seeking musicians to form a new band with him. Among the other pupils who respond to the note are Paul Hewson (Bono) and Adam Clayton. The band goes through a number of versions before becoming known as U2 in March 1978.

U2 begins its public performance life in small venues in Dublin, occasionally playing at other venues elsewhere in Ireland. In December 1979 they perform their first concerts outside Ireland, in London, and in 1980 begin extensive touring across the British Isles. Their debut album Boy is released in 1980.

In 1981, leading up to the October Tour, Evans comes very close to leaving U2 for religious reasons, but he decides to stay. During this period he becomes involved with a group called Shalom Tigers, in which bandmates Bono and Larry Mullen Jr. are also involved. Shortly after deciding to remain with the band, he writes a piece of music that later becomes Sunday Bloody Sunday.

The Edge, Bob Ezrin, and Henry Juszkiewicz co-found Music Rising in 2005, a charity that helps provide replacement instruments for those that were lost in Hurricane Katrina. The instruments are originally only replaced for professional musicians but they soon realise the community churches and schools need instruments as well. The charity’s slogan is “Rebuilding the Gulf Region note by note” and has helped over a hundred musicians who were affected by the hurricane. The Edge also serves on the board of The Angiogenesis Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organisation dedicated to improving global health by advancing angiogenesis-based medicine, diets, and lifestyle.

In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine places him at number 38 on its list of “The 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time.” In 2012, Spin ranks him 13th on their own list.